Paul Levinson's Infinite Regress

reviewing 3 Body Problem; Black Doves; Bosch; Citadel; Criminal Minds; Dark Matter; Dexter: Original Sin; Dune: Prophecy; For All Mankind; Foundation; Hijack; House of the Dragon; Luther; Outlander; Presumed Innocent; Reacher; Severance; Silo; Slow Horses; Star Trek: Strange New Worlds; Surface; The: Ark, Day of the Jackal, Diplomat, Last of Us, Way Home; You +books, films, music, podcasts, politics

George Santayana had irrational faith in reason - I have irrational faith in TV.

Sunday, December 29, 2024

Outlander 7.14: Prostitute Economics

An excellent episode 7.14 of Outlander up on Starz this week. I won't warn you about spoilers because there will be none -- nothing too specific -- in this review. [But if you don't want any hint of a spoiler at all, be so advised.]

My favorite scene in this episode is when Arabella (Jane) explains to William how she charges as a prostitute, breaking down her services into three options. I don't recall hearing quite such salty language, certainly not in this context, before in the now long history of Outlander on Starz. There used to be a time in cable TV history when HBO and then Showtime were the leaders in these kinds of scenes with that kind of language. (Network TV, of course, is too frightened about FCC bans to include that language in their shows, however necessary for the story. Those FCC bans, and the FCC itself, are unconstitutional, in my view, because they blatantly violate our First Amendment. But don't get me started.)

Anyway, the scene between Arabella and William is not only frank, but surprisingly tender (with excellent acting by both Silvia Presente as Arabella and Charles Vandervaart as William). But maybe "surprisingly" is unfair to the series, certainly this season, where there has been a mix of violence, and brutal honesty, and tenderness, many times. The relationship between Claire and John Grey is a great example, played out over a few episodes. It was very good to see Claire tenderly -- and not so tenderly -- patch up John's eye, whose socket had been fractured by Jamie's outraged punch in episode 7.12. Patching up the eye, I think, is symbolic for patching up the relationship of Claire and John, and I hope the beginning of doing that for Jamie and John, too.

Meanwhile, over in Scotland, it looks like Brianna and Roger are on the verge of crossing paths through time, with Brianna going back in time to look for her husband, just as Roger has realized that Jem their son may no longer be in the past. I hope for that family's sake that they don't get those wires too crossed in the episodes ahead.

Saturday, December 28, 2024

Podcast Review of A Complete Unknown: Nearly Completely Superb, Slightly Alternate History

Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 404, in which I review A Complete Unknown, the new Bob Dylan biopic, which my wife and I went to see on its opening day, Christmas, in New York.

Relevant links:

my written review of A Complete Unknown
Frank LoBuono's podcast interview with Terri Thal, Dylan's first manager
my written review of Jack Dann's The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History ... my podcast interview with Jack Dann
my video interview of Sarah Seltzer, author The Singer Sisters, a novel about a folk-singing family
It's Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles (my novel)

Check out this episode!

Friday, December 27, 2024

Dexter: Original Sin 1.4: The Role of Luck in Dexter's Profession and Life

A different kind Dexter: Original Sin 1.4 on Paramount+Showtime tonight as Dexter--

(Well, I better warn you about spoilers ahead .... ]

Dexter fails in his mission. Well, mostly. Harry warns Dexter, more than once, that Mad Dog, a professional hit man, might well be too much for the relatively inexperienced (in killing) Dexter to handle. And Harry is right. Mad Dog breaks loose, Dexter runs after him, and the only reason Mad Dog doesn't live to see another episode is he's hit by a car.

Now, since Mad Dog was running to get away from Dexter, in an important sense Dexter was responsible for Mad Dog's death. Which is why I said Dexter "mostly failed". Dexter certainly failed to kill Mad Dog that way Dexter wanted, in the technique we've seen him start to perfect in the previous episodes. But it was sheer luck, from Dexter's point of view, that that car along at just the right time.

Come to think of it, I have the sense that Dexter would be lucky again, more than once, in the long career he has ahead. But I can't think off-hand of any specific example, and it's been years since watched the original Dexter in real time. But I'm inclined to agree that luck has always been a part of Dexter's profession, if it not in his specific plans. And with Dexter played by Michael C. Hall coming back to the screen this coming summer in Dexter: Resurrection, I think it's safe to say that Dexter had a lot of luck in not being killed when his son shot him at the end of Dexter: New Blood.

And there were other good things to see in this fourth episode. It was good to see Joe Pantoliano on the screen playing Mad Dog. It was good to see Deb connecting with that guy, though it's almost certain there will be trouble ahead for her in that relationship. It was good to see LaGuerta beginning to see Dexter's acumen in identifying the reasons that people become corpses (it's always good to see LaGuerta). And most of all, it was good to see Harry finally getting totally together with Dexter's mother. (Well, he'd been resisting her only for an episode or two, but it was still good to see.)

And I look forward to seeing you back here next week when I review the next episode of this fine prequel series.

Reviews of Season 2: Dexter's Back: A Preview and Dexter Meets Heroes and 6. Dexter and De-Lila-h and 7. Best Line About Dexter - from Lila and 8. How Will Dexter Get Out of This? and The Plot Gets Tighter and Sharper and Dex, Doakes, and Harry and Deb's Belief Saves Dex and All's ... Well

See also about Season 1: First Place to Dexter

Wednesday, December 25, 2024

A Complete Unknown: A Nearly Completely Superb Bob Dylan Biopic, Slightly Alternate History

My wife and I just got back from seeing A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic. We both loved it. The following is my take on the movie.

Dylan recently famously tweeted (on X) that Timothée Chalamet is "a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me." Unsurprisingly, Dylan got it entirely right. Every biopic ever made is about someone inevitably a little or lot different from the subject of the movie. Not only can the actor not possibly look 100% like the subject -- unless they are the subject's identical twin, and the producer somehow managed to go back in time and talk the twin into playing the subject's part in the biopic -- but there's inevitably dialogue left out or changed, streets and buildings that don't look the same as the originals, etc, etc. Look, frankly, even a documentary is never entirely truthful. It may be more truthful than the biopic, but the director inevitably has to make easy and painful decisions to leave certain things out, etc, etc. In a phrase, all biopics and docu-dramas are alternate histories (and documentaries, too, just a little less so).

But A Complete Unknown is so good because it managed to get so many things right. Chalamet as Dylan and Edward Norton as Pete Seeger were letter and note perfect in the words they spoke, the songs they sang, and even what they looked like and how they moved. Monica Barbaro was not quite there singing as Joan Baez, whose rich mellifluous voice back then is unmatchable, but Barbaro hit all the notes well, and certainly captured Baez's attitude, energy, and intelligence with style. I don't know what Suze Rotolo at that age was like, even in video. She was inspiration for the part of Sylvie Russo in the movie, because Dylan (to his credit) in our current time didn't feel right about having her character by name in the movie, because she left the world in 2011 and couldn't give her consent to be portrayed in the movie -- but Elle Fanning did a fine job in the part. (The obvious explanation is Dylan wanted the name changed because some of the interactions with Dylan and Russo in the movie are at variance in some significant way with what really happened between Dylan and Rotolo.)

In addition to Dylan's songs, which were immensely enjoyable to see written, and see and hear performed, there was a symmetry, a kind of rhyme, in the movie, which I expect will stay with me for a long time. One of my favorite examples is Woody Guthrie's "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You". It starts off the movie, which begins in 1961, as Dylan comes to New York, and goes to see Woody Guthrie, who was already seriously ill (in reality, he'll live until 1967), and meets Pete Seeger (who had a wonderful cover of the song, solo, and earlier with The Weavers). At that point, it seems like the song is about Dylan and Seeger saying goodbye to Guthrie. But when the movie ends, with Dylan going the apostate electric way, the song is played again, and the goodbye is to the Dylan who has forsaken acoustic folk for an electric band with Al Cooper et al.

The title itself of this cinematic triumph underwent a transformative rhyme. Dylan is "a complete unknown" when he first crosses the Hudson and arrives in New York City and the movie begins. And of course the song that plays out the movie as Dylan commits to high voltage is "Like a Rolling Stone," in which "a complete unknown" is one of the many signature phrases.

The implication in the movie -- actually a little more than an implication -- is that Dylan did this because he wanted to be as famous as the Beatles. I don't know Dylan personally, and have no idea if that's true, but I do know that both kinds of Dylan -- "Blowing in the Wind," "The Times They Are A-Changin'," and "Masters of War" evolving into "Like a Rolling Stone," "Just Like A Woman," and "Positively Fourth Street" (I don't think the last two were in the movie) -- were equally works of genius in their own ways. And I also know, for whatever it's worth, that the lyrics Dylan wrote are in a class of their own, at the top of the best lyrics ever written, surpassing the timeless word-craft of Cole Porter, John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

There was one scene I found annoying in the movie. One of the highlights of the momentous Newport Folk Festival scene has Joan Baez singing "There But for Fortune," a huge hit for her, written by Phil Ochs. Dylan is shown offstage, not looking very happy. Maybe he's understandably nervous. Or maybe he's jealous. But the song isn't identified by Baez. And in fact there's no mention of Ochs anywhere in the movie. Whether an accidental oversight or a deliberate cut of something that was filmed ... who knows. It certainly doesn't make sense given the prominence of the song in that scene, not to tell the movie audience who wrote it.

I'm also sorry we didn't hear any of "God On Our Side" -- especially relevant on this day -- the most irrefutable anti-war song, pinpointing the hypocrisy and insanity of war, ever written.

But I guess that's just personal opinion, and I also think that, just like Dylan's songs, this movie will never grow old. It will be watched long into the future, after which people might watch Peter Jackson's documentary about The Beatles, and then Martin Scorsese's. But there's no need to wait for the future. My recommendation is see A Complete Unknown as soon as you can.

=============

One of the real people left out of the movie is Terri Thal, Dylan's first manager. Here's an interview Frank LoBuono did with her on his Being Frank podcast on May 30, 2024.

For more on the movie, see David Browne's piece in Rolling Stone.

=============

I haven't written an alternate history as yet about Dylan, but here's one I wrote about The Beatles, in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover

I've always been partial to rhymes. They're the velcro of the mind.

You can listen to my 1972 album on Bandcamp and Spotify.

The Weavers singing "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You"

Monday, December 23, 2024

Podcast: Paul Levinson interviews Jared Moshe about Aporia

Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 403, in which I interview Jared Moshe about his movie Aporia, a time-travel movie on Hulu that explores, in a way I've never seen before, the wrenching ethical dilemmas that arise when you try to change the past.

Relevant links:

my written review of Aporia
Aporia on Hulu
more about Jared Moshe here
my best-known time travel novel
my best-known alternate history novel

Check out this episode!

Sunday, December 22, 2024

Dune: Prophecy Season One Finale: Truths Coming Out

Dune: Prophecy put up a powerfully long finale tonight on Max -- an hour and twenty-one minutes -- for its short six-episode debut season. And it made every minute and sound of the Voice count, as it dealt out a series of blows and retributions and affirmations of what we already knew and suspected.

[I'm not going to give you a detailed recap, but I suppose I should warn about spoilers anyway ... ]

First, we learned more of the brutal truth about what Valya was willing to do, and did, to insure that the Sisterhood went her way. That way was to keep AI as an essential weapon in the Sisterhood's arsenal. I agree with Valtya's view of AI, But as to her methods ... well, we see that she killed not only Dorotea but a vast majority of the Sisterhood in that room, because they opposed her view, and thought AI was a blasphemous threat to humanity.

Later, we're also treated to a battle royale between Valya and Desmond Hart. It's pretty much a draw. As readers of my reviews here of Dune: Prophecy know, I've been a bigger fan of Hart than Valya. They might both have well died, had not Tulya arrived and rallied her sister Valya -- and then, after convincing Valya to let her son Hart be, because she as his mother not only loved him but was sure she could control him, Tula goes and tends to her wounded son. I said a few episodes ago that I thought Tulia would ultimately be a more potent character than Valya, and I think she proved it in that scene and in this episode.

One thing I didn't like, though, was the Emperor's self-inflicted death. He wasn't a bad Emperor, as far as Emperors go. But leaving a Bene Gesserit in the palace, who now through face- and body-shifting looks just like Princess Ynez, I thought that was a pretty cool move.

All in all, I think these six episodes have offered a memorable and captivating prologue to the Dune saga. Kudos, again, to Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert who wrote the novel Sisterhood of Dune, which I haven't yet read and on which Dune: Prophecy is based, Frank Herbert who got the Dune saga going with a series of masterpiece novels, and everyone who starred in this TV series.

I'll see you back here when the second season comes along.

and Dune, Part One: Half the Movie, Twice the Power of Most Other Complete Films ... Dune, Part Two: Not As Good as Part One

Outlander 7.13: Good Scenes, Ad Hoc Metaphysics

Lots of good scenes in Outlander 7.13, but the story -- or, more precisely, mostly Roger's story in 1739 -- was a little muddled, at least to me.

[Spoilers ahead ... ]

Here are the scenes that I really liked:

Young Ian and Rachel getting married, and later that night in bed. Both were handled with sensitivity, intelligence, and passion.
Jamie and Claire in bed together was good to see, too.
Roger and his father in 1739 was excellent, too.

But speaking of Roger in 1739, although I was glad to see him at the end of the episode realize that Jem was likely no longer in the past -- important, because we need to see him get back to Brianna in the 1980s -- the time travel, the conduit through time via the stones having never been crystal clear, was even less clear as we hear Roger musing about it. The way the stones are now working, or maybe always worked that way, is if you think really hard about someone when you touch the stone, you're more likely to end up in that person's precise time? I got that Roger said the stones brought you in general back and forth over a 200-year period between the 1900s and the 1700s. We knew that already. But this fine tuning ... I don't know. As I've said lots of times in these reviews, I haven't read the books. Maybe that fine tuning is made more clear on those printed pages. But it seems a bit like some kind of mind-over-matter hocus pocus in the television series.

Time travel of course is science fiction, and not real either. But I guess I like my science fiction to be governed by a somewhat discernible series of cause-and-effects. You have these stones in places on both sides of the Atlantic, and touching them in the right place can get you back and forth in time, 200 years either way. But giving the time traveler the power to affect the exact arrival date or year, that's quite a lot more.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing how all of this plays out in the remaining episodes in this second half of the seventh season.

Saturday, December 21, 2024

Juror #2: Hitchcockian Courtroom

Just saw Juror #2 on Max, directed by Clint Eastwood (in his early 90s), and "rumored" (Wikipedia's word) to be the final movie he'll be directing. I can tell you that the movie is powerful indeed, a twisty legal thriller, reminiscent of some of Hitchcock's work -- the writer, Jonathan Abrams, deserves some of the credit for that -- and I surely hope that Eastwood is able to direct a few more.

[And there will be spoilers about the set-up ahead ... ]

The set-up is ingenuously provocative: Justin finds himself on a jury hearing and then deliberating the case of James, on trial for murdering his girlfriend, Kendall. The two were seen arguing in a nearly violent way in a bar, but Justin knows that James didn't do it, because based on where Kendall's body was found, he's horrified to realize that the deer he thought he struck on the road on a rain-swept night was actually Kendall. Justin is a fundamentally decent person. But his wife Allison, who lost their earlier twins, is now very pregnant, not to mention that he wouldn't want to go to prison anyway, so his dilemma is how can he make sure James does not go to prison for a crime he didn't commit, while Justin stays out of prison himself?

That's what I mean about the movie being Hitchcockian. In movies like Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock excelled in heroes or anti-heroics caught in the grips of world-class ethical dilemmas. Juror #2 is also lifted by excellent acting. Nicholas Hoult and Zoey Deutch -- I don't recall seeing Hoult on the screen before, and I've seen Deutch just once, in The Outfit, where she was excellent -- were just perfect as Justin and Allison. J. K. Simmons and Kiefer Sutherland play characters who are medium important, but memorable.

I won't tell you what the ending is, except it certainly leaves the door open for a sequel. If you're a fan of the order part -- aka the courtroom part -- of Law & Order and its spinoffs, you can't go wrong with Juror #2.

***

Here, in case you're interested, is the true story of the time I was foreperson on a jury here in Westchester, NY.

Friday, December 20, 2024

Podcast Review of Dexter: Original Sin 1.1-1.3

Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 402, in which I review Dexter: Original Sin on Paramount+Showtime.

Relevant links:

written reviews of Dexter: Original Sin 1.1 and 1.2-1.3 (with links to written reviews of all episodes of Dexter: New Blood and all eight seasons of the original Dexter)
audio podcast reviews of Dexter: New Blood 1.1 ... 1.2 ... 1.3 ... 1.4 ... 1.5-1.6 ... 1.7-1.8 ... 1.9-1.10

Check out this episode!

"challenging fun"
- Entertainment Weekly

e-mail received from a reader:
Dear Paul, I just dreamed of airships flying between raindrops. I just returned from 2042 CE, where I sold my hardcover copy of The Plot to Save Socrates for seventy million Neo-Euros, because it had your response to this e-mail from way back in 2007 scotch-taped onto the inside of the cover. A Paul Levinson collector paid top Neo-Euro, because of the authentic archaic e-mail printout from you. It turns out that not many of your e-mails from before your tenure as CEO of HBO/Cinemax and terms as United Nations Secretary General will survive that far into the future. So, please respond to this e-mail, to help found my great-grandchildren's fortune. My Will will stipulate that they must share with your great grandchildren. Thanks! Tom

I of course happily replied...

42 reviews of The Plot to Save Socrates!